Joron

City Lights Books just published Compression & Purity, a new poetry book by L.A.-based African-American surrealist, Will Alexander. Alexander writes densely textured “psychedelic” or scientific surrealism with a strong affinity for arcane vocabulary. “On Scorpions & Swallows” begins:

Not claimed
by the accessible as contrast
or as competition by loss
or mathematics by peril

but occlusion as opposable phylums

minus a dark synesthesial as rote
minus the axial smoke of a rotted bonfire hamlet

I mean
oasis as savage dialectic rotation
meaning species as aggressive salt
as curious vertical blazing

in reversed arrayal
I think of interior cobalt swallows
with predacious ignition
a contradictory igniting
beautific with scopolamine

I am struck with Alexander’s careful phrasings, his manipulation of thematic shape and his mastery of extensions. For instance, the poetry quoted above, “On Scorpions & Swallows,” reads like a single, extended sentence creating a sonnet-like problem-and-answer structure to the poem. Alexander favors long, elliptical syntactic units that span several stanzas, increasing the complexity and obscurity of his style.

The dense texture might intimidate the reader, but it does not necessarily ambiguate meaning. Contrarily, he is often clear and exceedingly poignant. Take, for example, how he uses scientific jargon to describe Cesar Vellejo:

calling up vacuums written in vicuna

through fabulous confounding

through anarchical visceral cascade

like unstructured findings

curiously filtered

through a partially constricted gullet

Stanzas like these are astounding to me, perhaps partly because they are foiled by adjacent stanzas that seem obscure. Perhaps the oscillation of each stanza’s “logical” effectiveness is part of Alexander’s trick, as the images that resonate with readers probably vary significantly. On the other hand, even the obscure passages are attractive in a hieratic, rarified, geeky way. A good “Alexandrian” phrase gives the kind of satisfaction scholars get when they lecture at conferences in words that are technical and precise and somehow on the brink of incomprehension. The paradox and inner tension of precision and incomprehension creates an amusing, ironic tension. Carried through by this underlying tension, Alexander’s poetic textures hypnotize and seduce.

What is Alexander doing with language? His work focuses quite obviously on a particular semantic field (science) and employs strained but traditionally lyrical syntax. I, like Joron, see in this as reclaiming or deconstructing language—especially vocabularies that have been hitherto forbidden for the vast majority of literary writing. Certainly postmodern works has blurred generic boundaries, but Alexander seems to be showing, in an almost Pynchon-like way, that even the nuances of specialized language can be conscripted and subsumed into a larger poetic utterance. To a great extent, his project resembles the surrealists’ neo-Romantic mission to subordinate external reality to consciousness through linguistic looting. Furthermore, if we read Alexander as a surrealist, his poetry represents a shift from image-centered to poetry to word-centered surrealism. As Joron states, Alexander “positioned himself within the contingent order of the lexicon, refashioning (and thus reclaiming) language word by word. As a result, Alexander’s writing liberates the imagination from restricted economy of the image.” In the stanzas I quote above, you can see Alexander cutting up and recombining scientific language in this way, creating new contexts and opening up highly controlled language to expansive subjects. His poems are Max Ernst collages constructed from the archives of Scientific American and biology textbooks.

Until now, Alexander has been most known for his 1995 collection Asia & Haiti, as well as his 2005 Exobiology As Goddess. But when I examined the “books by” page of Compression & Purity, I was astonished to see several other titles attributed to Alexander in the two years, several of which I believe are forthcoming:

The sheer number of titles here suggests a prolific burst of energy, almost outnumbering in a matter of months the works he has published before this decade. Suffice it to say, if these titles are all indeed realities, then Alexander may be entering the definitive stage in his career. Even more impressive, many other categories are represented here in addition to poetry: fiction, philosophy, essays and drama.

For more on Will Alexander, check out this video of him reading and this poem.